The use of rope was limited on the construction site. It was used to lift the freshly cut blocks about 0.5 m from the cutting bench and place them on their bearings, raising the ballast up to six meters to operate the east shaft located on the pavement access to the pyramid. Once the pyramid was finished, the rope was also used to haul up the filling stones to the last cage at 140 meters high and then control their descent from there.

All these tasks required rope-deflecting rollers. Nowadays, pulleys would be used, but at that time, pulleys had the same disadvantage as the wheel when it came to withstanding loads of several tons:

It required an axis that could support this charge, which is not easy with wood or copper. But that is not all. There was also the pulley rotation problem on this axis, which would have had to be of a considerable diameter and therefore would have generated significant friction, which, absorbing too much energy, would have worn out rapidly.

One might argue that an oil could be used to lubricate the pulleys’ rotation on their axis, which could have been a solution. But on a construction site in the open air, frequently exposed to the winds from the nearby desert, sand would mix itself with the oil or grease, turning the lubricant into an abrasive paste.

Nonetheless, a hundred or so rope-deflecting rollers, at the most, were enough. This meant that builders could “tweak” them by reusing the technology used to operate the cone rollers of the autonomous roller skate.

Below, I represented the rollers in a 5-cm-diameter round section, 10 cm wide, but coned rollers could do the trick, hewn into granite or diorite, with an axial hole to hold the axis that will serve to hold the cord “links” together.

The “links” don’t have to exert any effort; they simply keep the rollers at the right distance.

Inside the caterpillar track, there is the pulley’s axis, and the rollers spin above. Each roller does a rotation on itself at the same time and moves along the axis’ surface, making the pulley.

A second caterpillar track is placed further on the axis, the whole resting on a semi-opened support, and we obtain a beautiful roller bearing pulley with a low rotation resistance since there is no friction and only a small distortion of the axis where the roller meets the axis.

For better output, it is best to have a support made of hard stone, such as granite or diorite. I represented it here in a semi-round shape, but that is a luxury; a V- or U-shaped support could do the trick!

The ancient Egyptians could have made such a device.

If the load is very heavy, all it takes is to increase the diameter of the axis and add rollers to the caterpillar track inside a bigger support.

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